Elementary. (No, Not School.)

CECILIA [to Dadam]: Dad, if Sherlock Holmes met you, he would probably say, "Thirty-five years old, just bought new Yaktrax today!"

(Explanatory note: The girls and I have been watching the old Granada Adventures of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett. Yaktrax are basically snow chains for running shoes, and I did in fact buy a new pair yesterday.)

Movie Quotes.

Responses to the movie Dinosaur.

Ruby: Dinosaurs used to be my favorite animal, but now they're extinct, so I don't see them anymore.

***

Ruby: I feel like I just saw this movie yesterday!
Cici: It was yesterday.

Happy Independence Day.

[Ruby and Dadam are watching a PBS special on Buckingham Palace.]

Ruby: Wow, the Queen's house is beautiful.

Dadam: Mm-hm. Oh, look there she is.

Ruby: Where?

Dadam: That lady there, in the purple dress and hat.

Ruby: What?

Dadam: That's her.

Ruby: That's the Queen?

Dadam: Yeah . . . what's the matter?

Ruby: I thought she would be more fashion.

Poison Popeyes.

Charles Osgood, in the closing moments of today's CBS Sunday Morning: . . . We leave you today in New Mexico, where the poppies are blooming.

Dadam [to Cecilia]: Do you remember a movie we've seen that has poppies? Where people are running through a field of poppies and they all fall asleep?

Cici: Um, Popeye?

In Which Dadam Explains Acting To Ruby.

[Dadam and Ruby are watching a profile of Harrison Ford on CBS Sunday Morning.]

Ruby: Wait, was that Indiana Jones next to that monster?

Dadam: Yes - you see, this man is an actor. That means he pretends to be different characters - that's called "playing" them. This guy played Indiana Jones, and he also played Han Solo in Star Wars.

Ruby: Oh, okay. Wait, who's Pod Horso?

Ladies Night.

Monday afternoon I received a call from Cecilia who was in the nurse's office complaining of a stomachache. When I asked her to describe what she was feeling, all she could come up with was, "Weird." She didn't have a fever, didn't feel like she was going to throw up, but thought it would be best if I came to pick her up. I encouraged her to drink some water, eat a cracker, and rest for 10 minutes before calling me back. Ten minutes later the phone rang and she again asked that I come pick her up because her stomach still felt weird. I told her no, of course, and that she should try to survive the last 1.5 hours of her day and then come home on the bus and I would comfort her at that time. After I hung up the phone I realized what was going on: With all the attention being given to Ruby and her finger, someone was feeling a little under-appreciated. Well, duh. Parenting 101. So when she came home after school (feeling totally fine by the way), I asked if maybe she wanted to go on a date with me, just the two of us. She lit up like 4th of July fireworks. Not 10 minutes later she had generated a list of possible activities for our date, and we agreed it would happen on the weekend so that we didn't have to worry about school.

So tonight Cecilia and I are off to a movie at the Omnitheater (which I can never get enough of anyway), and then out for fancy dessert. I'm excited to spend this time with her, get a little break from the Emergency Room Wonderkid, and enjoy the sparkling personality of my first-born. If I play my cards right perhaps we can avoid any more calls from the school nurse for a while...

Answer: Six Minutes.

Question: Approximately how long did Cici and Ruby laugh when the narrator on PBS's Nature said "brown booby" last night?

Bonding.

Tonight after dinner I went up to the bedroom to do some reading for school. About ten minutes later Ruby came upstairs, crawled onto the bed, and asked me if she could lay with me for a bit. I put down my reading and had the best conversation with my daughter. Here is some of what we covered:

• Why she likes the fish crackers at school so much (it turns out there's flavor inside that you can't see);
• The difference between an oval and a circle, a rhombus and a square;
• How annoying and frustrating it is that during dancing at school some of the kids get in her way (annoying and frustrating being her word choices);
• Her two favorite Doctor Who episodes (the one with the Oods and the one where the people turn into bats);
• What an Ood is;
• A funny story about how Dadam thought she was turning on the ceiling fan but it really was the box fan;
• How having too much dinner to eat is like being a baby and wanting to wear a dress that is too big and also you don't know how to work the zipper;
• All soup would be better if it had peanut butter in it;
• At Target there is a thing that you put your hand in and it pretends to chop it off (from Halloween time);
• Sometimes at bed Cici doesn't want a kiss good-night but Ruby always does;
• How poop and pee move differently through the pipes (which she kept calling "pumps") and this is similar to how a child slides down a slide at the park;
• And some other random tidbits thrown in for fun that I can't quite recall.

At one point Cecilia hollered up the stairs that Ruby should leave me alone because I was supposed to be doing homework, to which Ruby hollered back: "WE'RE JUST TALKING!" And even though I really, really need to get this schoolwork done, that conversation was the absolute highlight of my day. Hands down.

"Hey, Did The Little Girl Ever Get Her Bike Back?"

- Ruby, after watching The Goonies (in its entirety) for the first time, 10/21/09.

An Alarming Conversation, Part 3.

[The next day.]

Dadam [coming in the door after work]: What are you watching, Cici?

Cici: Becker.

Dadam: Why do you like this show? Do you even know who any of the characters are?

Cici: I know who Becker is. That's all that matters.

An Alarming Conversation, Part 2.

Cici: Oh, Becker is over. But look, "Coming up next, more Becker!"

Dadam: Why do you like this show? Do you even understand it?

Cici [still not looking up]: I dunno. I'm into it.

An Alarming Conversation.

[Cecilia is watching television.]

Dadam: What are you watching, Cici?

Cici [without looking up]: Becker.

Excerpt From A Dinner Conversation.

Dadam: . . . and just forget about the cream for a minute. What I want to know is, how did they make coconut cream pie without any flour?

Momlissa: What?

Dadam: Where'd they get the flour?

Momlissa: What are you even talking about?

Dadam: On Gilligan's Island!

Momlissa: Oh my god.

Cici [shrugging]: They probably milled some.

Happy Birthday, Rubester!

Ruby, watching Two Fat Ladies with Dadam: Why are they cooking a delightful dinner?

The Judges Have Their Scores!

Our girls have been major Dancing with the Stars fans for several seasons now; in fact, we all like the show more than I ever would have guessed we would. Tonight Cici was even writing out her own suggestions for the contestants; here's what I found in the notebook she was writing in while watching:

Dancing with the stars

• Realy Dance
• Don't be Lazy when you Dance
• Don't look down whene Dancing
• Dance good not bad
  

Maria.

Cici and Ruby continue their love affair with The Sound of Music, which Ruby of course refers to as "Maria." (Actually, that's probably a more fitting title.) The best thing is - and you really have to hear this to get the full effect of it - when Cici sings along with the songs, she mimics Julie Andrew's unmistakable, ecstatically British diction ("the FIRST three notes just happen to be," "WILD geese that fly with the MOON on their wings!", etc.). I actually think all kids who watch this movie do this; it just isn't possible to sing these songs without trying to do Julie Andrews, is it?

Ruby The Fatalist.

Dadam: Ruby, I'm sorry I stepped on your hat with my boot and got it wet.

Ruby: It's okay.

Dadam: It was an accident.

Ruby: No, it wasn't an accident.

Dadam: What?

Ruby [sagely]: There are no accidents.

[Note: For those of you who haven't seen it, Ruby is quoting the old martial-arts master in Kung-Fu Panda.]

Cici The Foodie.

Those of you who know Momlissa and me well are aware that we like food. We like eating it, we like making it, we like trying things we've never had before, we like forcing other people to try things they've never had before, we like talking about it, we like reading about it, we like watching TV shows about it (even if they're on creaky old VHS cassettes that we've already watched together a thousand times).

Well, lately we've been feeling that Cecilia might have caught her parents' food bug. A few pieces of evidence (in addition to the conversation about tater-tot hotdish that Momlissa has already documented) point in this direction:

1) When eating some homemade applesauce Momlissa made a couple weeks ago, Cici said she preferred it to the stuff she got at her school, because the texture (chunky) was so much better. (And she's right about that, of course.)

2) At breakfast a few days ago, she made some very accurate observations about the differences in flavor between Honeycrisp apples (sweet) and Haralsons (sour). (She prefers the Haralsons, and so do I.)

3) The other night we went to see Christopher Kimball, a noted food expert, the founder of Cooks Illustrated magazine and host of America's Test Kitchen on PBS. Cici watches the show with us, and after we had attended the event she said to me, "Dad, if he's such a great cook, how come he never cooks anything on the show?" (A great question - I told her she should have raised her hand and put him on the spot during the Q&A.)

And 4) (although this one's more funny than observant) When we were getting ready to go see Kimball, I told Cici that we were going to see somebody who was a famous cook. She said, "You mean Earl?" It took me a minute to figure out who she was talking about - and then I realized she meant "Boilmaster Earl," the crazy old fisherman who oversaw the rustic Wisconsin fish boil we went to last month!

What a super kid. I hope she never loses interest.

Probably Not, Rubes.

So, a couple weeks ago Cici and Ruby and I were watching 60 Minutes, and there was a story on some bullfighters in Spain. Cici was full of questions about it, and I told her what little I know about the sport, trying hard not to be either too critical or too P.C. about it all. Cici absorbed it all in her usual thoughtful way, and I didn't give it another thought.

Until a couple days ago, when our daycare provider told Momlissa that all the kids had been on a walk in the neighborhood, and when they had passed by a baseball field, Ruby asked, "Oh, is that where they do the bullfights?"

Now That's Harsh.

[On TV, a toddler is throwing a tantrum.]

Dadam: Ruby, is that kid being good, or bad?

Ruby: Bad.

Dadam: Yeah, he's probably going to get in trouble, isn't he.

Cici: Yeah. [pause] Probably they're going to send him to the glue factory.